Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

Erectids built no permanent structures, and because they still had a considerable amount of body hair, they did not particularly seek out shade. They knew better than to live right beside the stream—too many animals gathered there to drink, day and night, but especially at dawn and dusk. Better to be a little ways off.

The Erectids organized themselves for protection, and they needed it constantly. Hyenas, savage and relentless, arrived at different times and from different directions, but they did not miss a day. Their favorite prey was untended babies of any mammal species—enough meat to be worth catching, yet small enough to grab and carry off for later dining.

That meant that Wheaton got to observe them in defensive action all the time. When the men were in camp, they used stones and sharpened sticks—not stone-headed spears, not yet—to repel the hyena incursions. But when the young, strong hunters were gone, the adult women, the old folks, and the older children were fierce and savage in defense of the babies.

Noxon loved to watch the babies and toddlers. Walking was already a skill the little ones aspired to from a very early age; Wheaton said that it was a necessity because Erectid arms were already too short to walk on all fours the way chimps and gorillas did.

The little ones crawled and then walked as soon as they could, exploring farther and farther from their mothers—their sole source of food, when they were so young, so they never quite lost sight of her. No wonder the hyenas, watching from a distance, grew hopeful. The little ones weren’t exactly fearless, but what they had were monkey fears—spiders bothered them more than animals that were trying to eat them.

But the alertness of the adults and older children never flagged. The Erectids had somehow marked out just how far a child could be allowed to roam before someone swooped in to carry it back to safety, and by the time a child was walking, he or she knew just how far was considered safe. This didn’t mean that they never crossed over that invisible line—but as soon as they approached it, they would begin checking to see if any adult was watching them. For the surest way to get adult attention was to stray beyond the line. But the children themselves had no desire to cross the line and actually get away with it—that would be dangerous. They knew that they should only “go too far” when someone older would be sure to notice and rescue them.

The babies also tussled with each other, the males constantly practicing for later struggles—warfare with other tribes, contests with animals, but, most importantly, battles for supremacy within the tribe.

For this Erectid tribe was still divided between alpha and non-alpha populations. They were on the verge of the forest, where dry dead trees showed that the wooded land had once reached much farther out into the savannah. The dead trees provided the savannah-dwellers with fuel for their fires and sticks for their prodding weapons; yet it wasn’t so very far to walk into greener woods, where the leaf-eating branch of the tribe still lived with the alpha male and his harem of closely-watched females.

But it was the group that lived fulltime on the savannah, in the grassland, dealing with predators, walking upright all the time, hunting for their food, twisting grasses into twines and weaving them into baskets—they were the ones that Professor Wheaton insisted they must watch. “Because these are the ones heading toward becoming humans.”

“Not because they want to,” said Deborah. “It just happens when they aren’t paying attention.”

“Less than two million years till the tee shirt,” said Ram Odin. “And starflight.”

“But right now they don’t have the slightest interest in either,” said Deborah. “They just want to eat, pee, get laid, and keep the babies alive.”

“My little girl,” said Professor Wheaton. But he didn’t look at her. He only watched the vids they had taken of camp life.

They only visited the camp while slicing time—invisibility was essential. But they set up video cameras and changed out the memory cards several times a day.

“I don’t see the point,” said Ram. “You can’t show them to anybody. You can’t use them to prove anything you might write about.”

Wheaton didn’t even bother to answer.

“Father’s already at the peak of his profession,” Deborah explained to Noxon later. “He doesn’t need to publish this stuff. It just makes him happy to know it. He and I will watch these vids later. He’s already told me to erase them when he dies.”

They did not visit sequential days. From the Erectids’ paths, Noxon knew that this encampment remained for three years, before prey animals grew too sparse and they moved on. So each day, they visited a different point in time, noticing how the children had grown, how courtship patterns had changed.

“Not monogamous yet,” said Wheaton. “But it’s starting. Repeated pairings between the same couple. And because females have to be larger and stronger to defend against hyenas, they’re also strong enough to resist being kidnapped and sequestered.”

“Raped,” Deborah corrected.

“‘Raped’ carries criminal connotations,” said Wheaton. “Because of the progress the Erectids are making, we can afford to criminalize it now, must do so. But they inherited chimplike behavior patterns in which rape was one of the few ways around the dominance of the alpha male. It was the only way non-alphas could get their genes into the next generation.”

“And now we still can’t expunge that old pattern,” said Deborah to Noxon. “Even though ‘kidnap-and-sequester’ has been criminalized in most cultures for thousands of years.”

“Civilization only became possible as monogamous pair-bonding emerged,” said Wheaton, “which it’s only just starting to do in this tribe. The females are getting a real advantage from being larger, and in a while they’ll be in a position to start objecting and making their objections stick. Besides, alpha males can tolerate a little genetic insertion by stealthy beta males, but an uxorious male has only one mate, and he can’t afford any genetic imposition from other males. Our Erectids are just taking their first steps on the road to sapience and civilization.”

“And even then, alphas and stalkers and rapists still keep popping up.”

“Because those behaviors still succeed, reproductively, often enough to keep the genes active.” Wheaton held out his hands, as if asking for something. “Give ’em a break. These kids are still sixty or seventy thousand generations away from equal treatment of the sexes.”

“‘These kids,’” said Ram.

“Kids with a new car. Just learning how to pilot this upright body.” Wheaton turned away, finished with discussion of an issue he must have resolved in his own mind decades ago. “Noxon, we’ve observed and recorded nearly their whole time at this site. Can we please follow them on a hunt?”

“They run for a living. We can’t keep up with them, especially not if we’re slicing time, which makes them faster, us slower. None of us is fit enough to stay with them on a hunt.”

“Pick a short chase,” said Deborah. “We’ll saunter to the kill site, and then you’ll bump us back in time to when the prey arrives with our friends in hot pursuit.”

&nbs